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New York City, June 15, 2016 — This year, the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) welcomes its third class of art history doctoral students to the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. The two-week curatorial intensive takes place in New York City and introduces a select group of promising young scholars to the leadership skills that underlie cultural institutions as well as the importance of object-based methodologies. Inaugurated in 2014 through the generous support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the seminar scales CCL’s core program for senior curators to a younger generation of doctoral students in order to cultivate curatorial leaders at an earlier phase in their professional growth. As is its mission, the seminar strengthens the students’ outstanding academic backgrounds with a critical awareness of curatorial practice.

A panel of senior curators and CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar alumni chose the fifteen students from a pool of nearly 70 applicants. The incoming participants come from thirteen public and private universities across the country and possess a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds. For some students this will be their first sustained consideration of museological applications, while others have a track record of curatorial accomplishments—including independent curators, museum fellows, and curatorial collective members.

Each student brings to the program a distinct area of art historical specialty that drives the programming for the duration of the seminar. The cohort’s specializations run the gamut from Edo-period Japan, Early Renaissance, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century European visual culture to modern photography of the African Diaspora and contemporary media. This breadth of global interests promises to enrich the dialogue around museum collections and exhibitions while underscoring the nuances of varied curatorial approaches.

This year’s seminar begins on July 10 and will immerse the students in institutions of all sizes and specialties, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, The Morgan Library & Museum, and the Newark Museum. The group will meet with a number of prominent directors and curators as well as individuals working

Center for Curatorial Leadership Engages Next Generation of Museum LeadersFifteen Art History Doctoral Students Selected for 2016 CCL/MellonFoundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice

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in departments such as conservation, education, and communications. Each student will also have one-on-one sessions with an assigned mentor—distinguished curators working in their specialty area. A team-based practicum project will challenge the class to examine how a selection of three New York City museums align their mission, collections, exhibitions, programming, and audience engagement. Coursework led by professors from Columbia Business School as well as conversations on discipline-wide matters affecting the field today will equip the students with the skills and insights necessary to drive museums towards their fullest and most innovative potential.

Contact:

Joseph Shaikewitz646-405-8067joseph.shaikewitz@artcurators.org

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The students, listed alphabetically, are:

Anita N. BatemanDuke UniversityModern and Contemporary Art

Layla BermeoHarvard UniversityAmerican Art

Margot BernsteinColumbia UniversityEighteenth-Century European Art and Visual Culture

Kit BrooksHarvard UniversityEdo-period Japan

J.V. DecemviraleUniversity of California, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art

Lee HallmanThe Graduate Center, CUNYModern Art and British Art

Uchenna Itam The University of Texas at Austin Modern and Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora

Alexander Kauffman University of PennsylvaniaModern Art and Media

Rozemarijn LandsmanColumbia UniversityEarly Modern European Art

Shana LopesRutgers UniversityHistory of Photography

Julie McGinnis Flanagan Temple University American Art

Kayleigh Perkov University of California, Irvine Craft and the Decorative Arts

Lauren TaylorUniversity of California, Los AngelesAfrican Art

Nancy Thebaut University of ChicagoMedieval Art

John WittyEmory University Early Renaissance Art

CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial PracticeClass of 2016

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Anita N. BatemanDuke UniversityModern and Contemporary Art

Layla BermeoHarvard UniversityAmerican Art

Anita N. Bateman is a Ph.D. candidate in the de-partment of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She specializes in African art and the art of the African diaspora with additional in-terests in modern and contemporary photography. Her dissertation, “Ethiopia in Focus: Photography, Nationalism, Diaspora, and Modernization,” examines the Marxist-Leninist pasts of Ethiopia and Eritrea, their current statuses as burgeoning centers of art, and ethnic/cultural identity. She has been awarded the Pre-Doctoral Research Development Grant and the Graduate Studies

Enhancement Grant from the Social Science Research Council, and is a Mellon Mays Fellow and an alumna of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers. Anita has interned at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum, and the non-profit organization, UrbanArt Commission, in Memphis, TN. Her published work has been featured in the International Review of African-American Art and in the Journal of Black Studies. She holds a B.A. with distinction in Art from Williams College and an M.A. in the History of Art from Duke University.

Layla Bermeo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Images without Borders: North American Art & the U.S.-Mexican War,” has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and

the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Layla is the co-creator of Harvard’s “Black History/Art History Lecture & Performance Series,” and she has worked in galleries and museums, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

2016 Seminar Students

Margot BernsteinColumbia UniversityEighteenth-Century European Art and Visual Culture

Margot Bernstein is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University with a specialty in eighteenth-century art and visual culture. Her dissertation, “Carmontelle’s Facebook: Portraiture, Persona, and Permeability in Eighteenth-Century France,” examines hundreds of portraits on paper produced by Louis Carrogis called Carmontelle (1717-1806), a French amateur draftsman. Margot received her B.A. in art history and history from Williams College in 2010. She taught English for

the French Ministry of Education in Paris during the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2012, she earned her M.A. in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she studied eighteenth-cen-tury French and British drawings. She also holds an M.A. and an M.Phil. in art history from Columbia University. Margot has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the Calder Foundation, and the Williams College Museum of Art.

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2016 Seminar Students

J.V. DecemviraleUniversity of California, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art

Kit Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of the History of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University, specializing in Japanese art history of the Edo period (1603–1868). Their dissertation, “Something Rubbed: Medium, Texture, and History in Japanese Surimono,” examines the po-sition of privately published surimono prints in the broader picture of nineteenth-century Japanese print history and its contemporary awarenesses. Kit has held positions in several museums,

including the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Boston Children’s Museum. As an intern at the Harvard Art Museum, Kit planned the inaugural rotations for the new Japanese galleries at the reopened Fogg Museum. Kit also curated the exhibition “Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi,” at the Worcester Art Museum (Spring 2015). Kit is currently working on an exhibition of Japanese drawing to be held at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, in Fall 2017.

J.V. Decemvirale is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. in Art History from New York University and his M.A. in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. His dissertation, “Knowing Your Place And Making Do: Popular Arts Organizing in Black and Latino Los Angeles, 1960 to Present,” focuses on the methods and tactics of community-based cultural organizing

and popular arts activism in Los Angeles. He has in-terned and worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. J.V. has also worked as a project coordinator for several large symposia, the most recent being “Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea,” where he also presented a paper on his recent research on black arts activism in Los Angeles.

Lee HallmanThe Graduate Center, CUNYModern Art and British Art

Lee Hallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, specializing in twentieth-century art. Her disserta-tion investigates the complex renewals of the land-scape tradition in the postwar London paintings of British artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Lee also maintains active research interests in the history of drawings and connections between visual art and music. She received her B.A. from Vanderbilt University, a Postgraduate Diploma from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an M.A.

from the University of Texas at Austin. She has assisted with exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and was the 2012-13 CUNY/Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her writings and reviews have appeared in The Burlington Magazine, Tate Papers, and Apollo, and in 2014 she contributed a catalogue essay to an exhibition at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, Münster, Germany.

Kit BrooksHarvard UniversityEdo-period Japan

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2016 Seminar Students

Alexander Kauffman University of PennsylvaniaModern Art and Media

Uchenna Itam is a Ph.D candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in modern and contemporary art of the African diaspora, focusing on embodiment-based practices in photography, video, and installation art. Her dissertation considers site-specific installations created in the United States from the early 1990s to the present that affect the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing while engaging with the politics of race, gender, and nationality.

Uchenna is a founding member of the curatorial collective INGZ, which collaborates on projects that foster new ways of engaging the visual and political. She has previously held positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Phillips Collection; The Smart Museum of Art; and The Pace Gallery. Uchenna earned an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Alexander Kauffman is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art with a graduate certificate in cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of modern art and media. He is currently completing a dissertation on the relationship between visual art and film in the work of Marcel Duchamp. Alex holds a B.A. summa cum laude from New York University and an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Modern and

Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2013-2014 and curator of the film program for the museum’s exhibition “Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp.” Recipient of the 2014 Herskovic Prize for an essay based on his master’s research, Alex is also a contributor to the catalogues of several recent exhibitions, including “Marcel Duchamp - La peinture, même. 1910-1923” at the Centre Pompidou.

Rozemarijn LandsmanColumbia UniversityEarly Modern European Art

Rozemarijn Landsman, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University, specializes in the Dutch seventeenth century. Her disserta-tion explores the work of Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712) in the realms of art, technology, and urban development. She is a recipient of a 2016-2017 Theodore Rousseau Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously, she was the Joseph F. McCrindle Curatorial Intern at the

National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and she has held graduate internships at various other institutions, including the Amsterdam Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Prior to coming to New York she received her B.A. and M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Amsterdam, followed by an M.A., funded by the Huygens Scholarship Programme, from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Uchenna Itam The University of Texas at Austin Modern and Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora

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Shana LopesRutgers UniversityHistory of Photography

Julie McGinnis Flanagan Temple University American Art

Shana Lopes is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, focusing on the history of photography. Before pursuing graduate studies in the history of art, she worked for several years in photography studios in San Francisco. She then earned an M.A. in Art History at the University of Arizona, where her thesis examined photography and the writing of history. Her current research explores the transatlantic exchange between nineteenth-cen-tury American and German photographic circles.

She has worked on curatorial projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the past five years, she has been an intern and research assis-tant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is presently conducting research for her disserta-tion in the Museum’s Department of Photographs as the Jane and Whitney Morgan Fellow.

Julie McGinnis Flanagan is a Ph. D. candidate in Art History at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She specializes in American and modern art with a deep interest in the history of collecting and display. Her current research centers on the creation of a global, democratic modernism in American art between the two World Wars as espoused by the Grand Central Art Galleries of New York. Julie received her bachelor’s degree in Art

and Archaeology from Princeton University, with certificates in French Language and Literature and American Studies, and her M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has worked in the curatorial and education departments at several museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and the New-York Historical Society.

2016 Seminar Students

Kayleigh Perkov University of California, Irvine Craft and the Decorative Arts

Kayleigh Perkov is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in American art, viewed through the lens of craft and the decorative arts. Her dissertation, “Giving Form to Feedback: Craft and Technological Systems circa 1968-1974,” histori-cizes current movements in personal fabrication by examining objects that synthesize handmaking and emergent technology. Her dissertation is supported by a grant from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design. She was a graduate intern

of contemporary decorative arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and she is the 2016-2017 William H. Truettner Predoctoral Fellow at The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Kayleigh has an additional interest in the digital humanities, and was the 2015 graduate intern at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) where she assisted with the Center’s digital projects. She will be the 2016-17 graduate intern of Digital Art History/Web and New Media Development at the Getty Research Institute.

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Lauren TaylorUniversity of California, Los AngelesAfrican Art

Nancy Thebaut University of ChicagoMedieval Art

Lauren Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she specializes in the study of African art as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of Distinction. Lauren’s dissertation examines the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, investigating the significant role of the arts and their display in negotiating post-colonial international relations in Senegal.

She has participated in curatorial, conservation, and education projects at a variety of museums, working with the African collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Lauren is the 2015-2016 Arts and Exhibition editor of Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.

Nancy Thebaut is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, where she studies medieval art and theology. She earned a B.A. at Agnes Scott College (2008), an M.A. at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2009), and a “diplôme de muséologie” at the Ecole du Louvre (2011). In her dissertation, “Non est hic: Figuring Christ’s Absence in Early Medieval Art,” she studies images of Christ after his Resurrection made during the

tenth through twelfth centuries in western Europe. Prior to beginning her doctorate, Nancy worked as an artist’s assistant for Judy Chicago and interned at the Musée de Cluny and the Cloisters, where she continues to be a guest lecturer. Nancy currently holds a two-year Kress History of Art Institutional Fellowship at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris, as well as a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship.

2016 Seminar Students

John WittyEmory University Early Renaissance Art

John Witty is a Ph.D. candidate and James Laney Fellow in art history at Emory University. Originally from Miami, Florida, John graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.F.A. in Printmaking, completing additional majors in German and Art History. He contin-ued exploring art historical study in terms of studio practice by writing his master’s thesis at Williams College on the fifteenth-century Italian artist Pisanello’s use of preparatory drawings for large-scale mural cycles. For his dissertation, John

will turn his attention to the fourteenth-century, examining the use of materials and framing de-vices in Paolo Veneziano’s Santa Chiara polyptych and related altarpieces. Alongside his academic study, John has worked as an art handler and intern at the Rubell Family Collection, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Ringling Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Clark Art Institute. In 2015, he was a Mellon Fellow in Object Centered Curatorial Research at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.